Patel brown Gallery | 21 Wade Ave

Mia sandhu | golden girls

November 21 2020 - january 16 2021

Mia Sandhu’s Golden Girls may, at first, make you blush — but investigate further. These warm, welcoming spaces greet viewers as the component that completes the whole relationship of watcher and the watched.

Shrouded by an unknowable frenzy of what could be hair, smoke, veils, or anxiety Sandhu’s women appear oddly alien. Only after you locate their facial features are you brought back down to earth. This unfamiliar quality can be traced back to Sandhu’s previous work, which focused on ethnic identity in an alien culture. In Golden Girls, Sandhu draws from personal and shared experiences, attempting to portray inner conflicts seemingly intrinsic to womanhood regardless of ethnicity or heritage. Sandhu’s protagonists appear on the cusp of something: they are unshackled by self-doubt, but perhaps are still fighting to be victorious in their new, unrepressed consciousness. What does it mean to “bare it all” but still cover your face? The artist uses this contradictory place as a point of inspiration. Utilizing the conflicting feelings of shame, self-acceptance, and sexuality, Sandhu aspires to tap into what it means to seek out self-authenticity in current cultural and political contexts.

Populating her dreamy-realms with intricate foliage, East Indian motifs, and the crunchy palette of 1970s home decor, Sandhu creates dynamic environments to explore the relationship between subject and voyeur. In many of Sandu’s works, the subject’s skin cannot be differentiated from the wall color — embodying the tension between the desire to be seen and the desire to be camouflaged, a literal “wall flower”. Sandhu employs this technique to underscore the performative aspects of confidence and sensuality. The body in Sandhu’s work appears as a site of pleasure, but also shame and illusion. The artist illuminates these complicated feelings with confident, gestural marks demonstrating the precise hand of an esteemed scenic painter.

The decorative aspects of Sandhu’s work also calls to mind the cyclical nature of trends — arts and fashion come back into style, as well as political predilections. The artist collects vintage erotica as source material, discovering inspiration in the variety of women, decor, and styles depicted. Finding another fruitful arena of contradiction, Sandhu’s work connects with the fraught historical opinions of soft-core porn in the 1970s and 1980s. Mirroring the name of the exhibition, this period, also known as the “Golden Age of Porn,” saw the commingling of visual arts and soft-core pornography, with artists like Andy Warhol even dabbling in adult-film direction. Simultaneously the 1970’s women’s liberation movement, or second- wave feminism, was building. Feminist views on pornography ranged from criticism of pornography as violence against women to embracing some forms as feminist and artistic expression.

This retro-aesthetic can be further found in the framing and oatmeal-brown mats of Golden Girls. Feeling notably domestic, the matting also mimics a sort of “key hole,” offering viewers a cropped, private view into the intimate environments these figures inhabit. Setting the stage with vintage wall paper, drapery, ratan chairs, and dusty upholstered pieces, the artist heightens the familiar while also amplifying the exhibitionist nature of gazing at these posed figures in their own homes. Golden Girls, Like the progressively-feminist television show of the 1990s, of the same name, we are invited to question the out- dated notions of women’s femininity, self-confidence, humour, companionship, and sexuality.

This exhibition is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.